AI is Dominating the Most Dreaded Job on the Planet

She presented herself as Eve, but Ben immediately recognized that the voice on the line was automated. Eve was aware of his name and even knew the amount he owed a previous landlord ($266). However, she was unaware that he had settled with a collection agency five months earlier. Eve claimed to be an AI representative from ProCollect, calling to collect a debt. “Would you prefer to resolve it today via card or bank transfer?” she inquired.

Ben had stepped outside on a warm April afternoon in Portland, Oregon, to take the call. (He requested that WIRED use a pseudonym to discuss his financial situation openly.) Standing in the sunlight, he pondered what he needed to say to transfer the call to a human. “I assumed it would eventually redirect me to a person when I asked about payment plans or something more complex,” he recalls. But Eve remained engaged, so Ben decided to stay on the line as well. He thought—why not?—to have a little fun with the bot.

Ben recalls asking the bot to participate in some role-play, where he was “just a little guy,” and his debt resembled a giantess ready to crush him. He wanted to test how strange Eve could get. The bot hesitantly played along for a few minutes, but then abruptly transferred him to a human agent. The representative didn’t reveal whether they had overheard Ben’s odd interaction with the AI. However, they swiftly clarified the situation: “They looked me up in the system,” he remembers. “Discovered that the balance was zero.”

Ben’s encounter is becoming more prevalent. With inflation and stagnant wages tightening budgets, debt delinquency in the United States is increasing. “Currently, we have the highest amount of collections in the courts that I’ve ever seen,” notes debt settlement expert Michael Bovee.

As an unprecedented number of individuals struggle to repay debts, companies pursuing collections are increasingly utilizing technology to enhance their efforts. Many of the communications—calls, emails, texts, and letters—requesting payment are now managed by AI agents. Their tone may be courteous, even obsequious, but they remain calm and composed, never losing their temper. Their advantages lie in persistence and scale. An analysis by the collections agency Kaplan Group projects that AI debt collectors will reach an industry value of nearly $16 billion within the next decade.

Proponents of AI often emphasize that as automation grows more advanced, society has a unique opportunity to eliminate some of the most undesirable jobs. Working in a call center is already unpleasant, and being in a position specifically aimed at collecting debts increases the stress. Career matching platform CareerExplorer ranks debt collection among the bottom 1 percent of professions for job satisfaction. Just as debt collectors may detest their jobs, the public also tends to dislike them. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau began taking complaints regarding debt collection, it received 11,000 in just six months, ranking just behind the mortgage sector as the financial service stirring the most discontent.

If any job sector could disappear without significant concern for job loss, it might just be this one. For a bot like Eve, what does it take to outdo the least admired individuals on the planet?

To gain a clearer understanding of Eve’s abilities, I decided to reach out to her myself.

However, when I dialed the number Ben provided, a human employee from ProCollect answered. Identifying myself as a journalist, they informed me that no one was available to address my questions and suggested I call back the following day. When I did, another human told me that the company does not utilize AI but advised that I contact human resources. HR instructed me to email my inquiries, which I promptly did. One of my questions: Where did Eve originate?